Ellis thought of his responsibilities–now to be shared with Staley and maybe even a couple of others, if he could find the right men–rather simply:
It was his job to make things easier for the colonel. Sometimes that meant he would fry up ham and eggs in the kitchen of the Colonel’s Georgetown town house. And sometimes it meant that he went around the world with the Colonel, serving as bodyguard and confidant and sort of private secretary and transportation officer. You name it, he did it.
And he got to learn a lot. He was supposed to read everything the Colonel read, so that if he had to do something for the Colonel, the Colonel wouldn’t have to waste his time explaining things. Some of the stuff he had to read was really pretty dull, but sometimes it was interesting. As far as he had been able to figure out, there was only one secret the Colonel knew that he didn’t. Ellis had concluded that Captain Douglass knew that secret, because when Ellis had started getting nosy, Douglass got his back up.
That secret had something to do with what an Army brigadier general named Leslie Groves was doing at a secret base in the Tennessee mountains with something called uranium. That’s what he’d asked Captain Douglass, “What’s uranium?”
That’s what had gotten Douglass’s back up.
“Now hear this clearly, Chief. You don’t ask that question. You don’t mention the word ‘uranium’ to me, or to Colonel Donovan, and certainly not to anyone else. You understand that?”
“Aye, aye. Sir.”
Ellis was confident that when the time came, he would find out what uranium was, and what General Groves was doing with it.
Some of the interesting things that came with the job had nothing to do with secrets.
What he had been doing when Staley had reported in, for example. He had been reading the Mainicbi. He didn’t think there were very many other people who got to do that. The Mainicbi was the English-language newspaper published in Tokyo. The edition he had in his hands was only ten days old. Ellis wondered how the hell they managed to get one in ten days halfway around the world from the Jap capital. But they did. And they did it regularly.
It was full of bullshit, of course.
For example, there was a story in the Mainichi today that troops under some Jap general with an unpronounceable name had destroyed the headquarters of Major General Fertig on Mindanao, killed General Fertig, and sent the rest of his troops running off to the mountains to starve.
The reason Ellis knew the story was pure bullshit was that he had been at
a briefing in the situation room when guerrilla activity in the Philippines had been discussed. A full-bull colonel–a guy who had gotten out of the Philippines with MacArthur and then had been sent to Washington as a liaison officer and who should know what he was talking about–had said that while there was a chance that small units of a dozen or so men could evade Japanese capture for as long as several months, there was no possibility of organized “militarily significant” guerrilla activity in the Philippines.
And there -was no General Fertig. Ellis had checked that out himself. The only guy named Fertig in the Philippines was a light colonel, a reserve officer reliably reported to have blown himself up taking down a bridge.
According to the Mainichi, this nonexistent general had at least a regiment, which the Japs wiped out to the last man at least once a week.
The messenger appeared in Chief Ellis’s office with the distribution. The messenger was an Army warrant officer in civilian clothes. There was no love lost between them. The warrant officer naturally wondered how come he was wandering around the halls of the National Institutes of Health, delivering the mail like a PFC clerk, while this swab-jockey got to sit around with his feet on a desk reading a newspaper.
Ellis signed his name twenty-seven times, acknowledging receipt of twenty seven Top Secret documents, each of which had to be accounted for separately, and then signed twice more for a batch of Secret, and Confidential, Files.